Linking populist attitudes and public sector stereotypes

Saar Alon-Barkat and Michal Gilboa

University of Haifa, School of Political Sciences 

Political science research documents the prevalence of populist attitudes among citizens across contemporary democracies, marked by a binary worldview contrasting the 'pure people' with the 'corrupt, self-serving elite’. Studies have shown the role of populist attitudes in citizens' voting, political attitudes, and policy preferences. We argue that these attitudes may also shape citizens’ basic views of public administration. Specifically, this study develops and tests a theoretical model linking populist attitudes to distinct stereotypes of public-sector employees. We theorize that citizens with stronger populist attitudes hold more negative stereotypes of public employees overall. Moreover, we suggest that populist attitudes affect not only the valence of stereotypes but also their content, shifting citizens’ perceptions from critiques of ability and performance toward moralized judgments about public officials’ intentions and moral orientation. We further argue that, in contexts where populist parties hold power, this association is moderated by partisanship and is stronger among supporters of the ruling populist coalition than among supporters of the opposition

We test our pre-registered hypotheses using a two-wave survey of Israeli citizens (January–February 2026), conducted under the populist right-wing coalition led by Benjamin Netanyahu. We analyze citizens' stereotypes of public employees by coding spontaneous associations. To test our hypotheses, we examine their relationship with validated populist-attitudes scales, across coalition and opposition supporters, and controlling for political and demographic covariates. Our tentative findings indicate that populist attitudes are associated with more negative overall stereotypes of public-sector employees, particularly among supporters of the governing coalition, although these effects are not robust across our statistical models. We further find that this link is driven specifically by one dimension of populist attitudes: anti-elitist views. Notably, and contrary to our expectations, the negative associations are not confined to moral judgments but also span perceptions of public employees' ability and performance. Overall, these findings point to a negative role of populist attitudes in shaping citizens' views of government and their expectation of encounters with public services and bureaucracies. These results carry potential implications for state capacity and democratic governance

For Pre-Registration Document: https://osf.io/75kcf/overview?view_only=e563072d2a714ee4a286ad9edd5ca5b0

For Registration: https://www.eventer.co.il/research01062026